Your Nokia phone catches the dog raiding the dustbin. “You leave your Nokia smartphone casually lying somewhere – like, watching the unattended dinner on the table – and when you suspect the culprit is there, you send a text to the phone. And it takes a picture! And then the software sends the picture – or the video – back to you, automatically, via MMS.”
The Register
Geek to Live: Save and annotate the Web with Scrapbook. “It’s no wonder why the Scrapbook Firefox extension was a winner in the recent Extend Firefox contest. Scrapbook saves bits and pieces of the Web to your local disk, lets you add comments and annotations, arrange the content in folders, and makes it all fully searchable without ever leaving your browser. A must-have tool for Internet researchers, students, writers and voracious bookmarkers, Scrapbook could change how you save and search bookmarks and Web content forever.”
Lifehacker
Solar-Powered Implant: Cure for Blindness?. “The tiny 1.5mm chip flexes in response to low intensity light, stimulating nerves that send visual info on to the brain.”
Gizmodo
Stealth Tabletop from Design Concepts. “This design concept of a Stealth Tabletop looks like a designer coffee table, but boot up the multimedia PC hiding underneath, and there’s a screen that magically appears.”
Gizmodo
Mozes: Secure Your Keyword. “Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information). Meet someone who has a Mozes keyword? SMS their Mozes keyword to 66937 and store whatever personal information they’ve elected to share. And online advertisers can use a Mozes keyword to give you more information on the product.”
TechCrunch
French road-test cashless technology. “Caen’s citizens have been road-testing the technology since late last year at a number of locations. Among them is an underground parking garage; the town hall; a bus stop that can transmit timetable information; a cinema poster that downloads video trailers to people’s phones; a local supermarket where people can pay for their groceries with their phone; and a tourist information sign outside the historic Abbaye des Hommes.
By touching a mobile phone against the Flytag logo at each of these locations, people can pay for services or receive information straight to their phone.”
CNET News.com
Quietrevolution Technicolor Wind Turbine. “It is designed as a vertical axis turbine so it remains very silent. Best of all, there are LEDs mounted around the outside of the turbine, so as it spins it can display images.”
Gizmodo
UK drivers trust GPS more than their own eyes. “Twice in the space of the last two weeks, we’ve seen reports of British drivers taking serious risks because they trust the info displayed on the small screen more than what they see through their windshield. In the most recent case, drivers passing through the village of Luckington have found themselves landing in the River Avon, by following a GPS-recommended route that pointed to a bridge that has been closed for a week.”
Engadget
Skateboard music interface. “The project, Skatesonic, uses the motions and sounds of skateboards and explores their inherent ambient rhythm to create music. In a way, each move translates to musical parameters and the rider ends up skating through a landscape of music (which s/he influences over time).”
we make money not art
Software tracks mood swings of blogosphere. “About 250,000 new LiveJournal posts are created every day and roughly 150,000 of these include a label for one of hundreds of different moods. Moodviews keeps track of these labels and generates a graph, revealing emotions shifts across all LiveJournal blogs over time.”
New Scientist
Fujitsu demos color e-ink LCD. “it’s going to be a little while before anyone tops Fujitsu’s bezel-tastic QVGA color LCD e-ink display, which holds color images steady in perpetuity without power.”
Engadget
Tamagotchis seek second wave of virtual pet owners. “The pets can grow into adults that hold down jobs and even get married to someone else’s tamagotchi. Once the couple has babies — always twins so each owner gets a baby — the parents disappear to Planet Tamagotchi, which the children can visit via a personal computer.”
Reuters
Nanogenerators May Spark Miniature Machines. “Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have crafted tiny nanowires that generate electricity when they vibrate. [ ... ] Only 20-40 billionths of a meter in diameter, each fiber partners with millions of others to form a nanogenerator capable of producing significant amounts of energy from the slightest activity. According to the researchers, motions from body movement, the stretching of muscles and even the flow of liquids should be able to generate electric charges in the wires – perfect for implantable medical devices, “smart” apparel and a variety of other applications.”
lockergnome
The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments. “Our surveys show that 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.”
Pew Internet & American Life
Phone to Carry Video Projector. “A South Korean company developed a coin-size laser video projector module that can fit into portable gadgets such as mobile phones and digital cameras. [...] “We expect about five percent of all mobile phones to have the video projector function by 2010. That is more than 60 million units. And we aim to grab about 30 percent of the market at least, or 530 billion won a year.”
The Korea Times
Emerging Technologies and their Impact. “it’s a system that uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) chips lodged inside many cell phones to track a vehicle’s coordinates. Whenever a driver who’s talking on a phone closes to within 100 meters of a stoplight, the system interrupts his or her conversation with a loud chirp — providing a not-so-gentle reminder to slow down.”
Technology Review
Global broadband population to double by 2010. “Boffins have totted up the numbers and reckon there are now some 200 million broadband lines around the world. And according to researchers at In-Stat this number is expected to top 400m by the end of 2010.”
| The Register
Holographic storage demonstrates 515 Gigabits Per Square Inch Data Density. “Holographic data storage pioneer InPhase Technologies, has announced that it has demonstrated the highest data density of any commercial technology by recording 515 gigabits of data per square inch.”
gizmag
Multimedia headset with attitude. “The Synapse has twin earpieces with individual touch-sensitive controls, is mutable with a single tap and volume adjusts with the swipe of a finger. It has twin throat microphones to enable discrete conversations via your mobile phone and it isn’t going to come loose because the pretensioned arms provide a secure fit that moves with you”
gizmag
Triple Watch Cell Phone design. “The Triple Watch Cell Phone is a wrist watch that can be transformed into a cell phone. You can slide the unit out of the wristwatch band, and extend it to use it as a normal cell phone. As a wrist watch, it would have a speakerphone button that allows the user to answer the phone and hang up while driving or the user can combine the Triple Watch with a Bluetooth headset”
gizmag
Mobile browsing becoming mainstream. “In 2005, 28 percent of those mobile phone owners used their phone to browse the Internet, up from 25 percent the year before. More significantly, the increase is driven by adults aged 35 and older joining younger users in this habit.”
CNET News.com
Telebeads, the Era of Sentient Jewelry. “Teenagers faced with these increasingly large and complex networks need better strategies for remembering their contacts and socially acceptable ways of using these strategies. The hand-held devices they use are already extremely complex, with multiple functions and complex interaction. We have chosen to explore a simpler solution, more suited to a teenage lifestyle: interactive telebeads…. Beads may be collected and exchanged as souvenirs of a person or event, and later act as a mnemonic for keeping track of members of a particular social network.”
Smart Mobs
Tagtype Garage Kit. “Japanese phonetic alphabets consist of 49 syllables which can be organized into a 10×5 matrix of consonants and vowels. The 5 5 main input buttons of Tagtype correspond to the 10 consonants and 5 vowels, making typing Japanese much more intuitive than with the standard QWERTY keyboard.”
RE. Design News
Social networking becomes work. “The laid-back atmosphere of the Googleplex might seem light years away from the dark-suited City of London. But Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the investment bank, is also a believer in the brave new world of wikis and blogs. “We recognised early on that these tools would allow us to collaborate more effectively than existing technologies,” says JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at DrKW. More than 450 DrKW employees have internal blogs and the bank has built an internal wiki with more than 2,000 pages which is used by a quarter of its workforce. After just six months, the traffic on the wiki exceeds that on the entire DrKW intranet.”
FT.com
C’ALL Future Phone: Phantasy for All, Technology for None. “The C’ALL future phone is a series of drawings and fanciful artwork by designer Dima Komissarov that envisions the all-in-one device that we’re craving, with a cellphone, MP3 player, GPS, hand-held Mac and PC, and everything else all crammed into a credit card-sized device. One of its most intriguing ideas is its chameleon-like credit card mag strip “player,” where you dial up your chosen credit card and it virtually turns into that card.”
Gizmodo
Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers. “Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a “disproportionately large influence” on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.”
MediaGuardian.co.uk
Read Without Flipping. “If you have a book, desk, and a display equipped with RFID chips, now you can read the whole contents through a large display just by putting the book on the desk ; antenna reads the chip information and delivers them to the display. Of course, you can actually use your hands – if you want – for a touch screen or a remote control.”
RFID in Japan
ScanR: Turn your camera phone into a scanner. “If you have a camera phone with at least one megapixel of resolution, ScanR is great for turning things like whiteboard images and paper drawings into something more usable. This is particularly interesting for heavy travellers who do not have a scanner handy. To use it, you simply take a picture and email it to scanr. They supply you with an enhanced pdf version by email.”
TechCrunch
VR Games Pit Pets Against Owners. “As in a traditional video game, players navigate a virtual world in a bid to stay alive. The twist? Computerized movements in Mice Arena are mapped to and from the real world, where an actual predator (your hamster) gives chase to a digital avatar (you) by pursuing a real piece of bait. The avatar’s movements in the virtual environment direct the bait around a small tank fitted with actuators that mold and twist an elastic latex floor into the changing terrain of the game map. The hamster’s pursuit in the tank is monitored by infra-red sensors that relay its position to the computer screen.”
Wired News
Most Popular P2P Files: PeerMind. “t’s a regularly updated list of the most popular music, movies, games, software and ringtones being downloaded on theEDonkey 2000 and Gnutella networks. Once this includes BitTorent, which is apparently coming soon, PeerMind’s lists will be a much more interesting indicator of consumer demand for media than other top lists determined by more indirect methods.”
TechCrunch
Virtual reality gets comfy. “Basically the simulator exploits a vection illusion of the brain, which makes us believe we are moving when actually we are stationary. The same can be experienced, for instance, when you are stopped at a traffic light in your car and the car next to you edges forward. Your brain interprets this peripheral visual information as though you are moving backwards.”
Primidi
MultiSwitch hub will allow LAN-less USB sharing. “Called the MultiSwitch hub, this device creates a proprietary behind-the-scenes network, allowing USB-equipped printers, cameras, hard drives, and other peripherals to be accessed by any combination of desktop, laptop, HTPC, or game console — with both machines able to interact with the devices simultaneously, according to the developer.”
Engadget
Marvin from HHGTTG moves to Second Life. “A resident of the Second Life virtual world who owns a UK branding company has started to move the characters he represents into the game, starting with those managed by Disney, one of his clients. The first into the virtual world is Marvin, the Paranoid Android, from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy movie.”
Boing Boing
The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz. “I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds. It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he’s saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.”
Wired News
Citizen LCD retains image even when off. “Citizen has developed something it’s calling the “memory liquid crystal,” a new passive matrix LCD that can retain an image even when powered off.”
Engadget
Peer-to-Peer Wireless Positioning. “The Navizon network is based on a collaborative database. Members with a GPS device can use Navizon to map the Wi-Fi and cellular landscape in their neighborhoods. Once they synchronize their data, it is made available to all the other users of the network. This way, users who don’t have a GPS device can benefit from a positioning system. And it’s free for personal use!”
Navizon
A “photoshop” for dance. “Rotosketch is an intuitive tool for sketching, doodling and notating on top of video, such that the marks that are made are linked in time with the video. This allows the user to draw strokes along the the axis of time, as well as the normal x and y axes, and for those strokes to augment, analyze, interpret, or even obliterate a video sequence.”
we make money not art
Theme park visitors can be tagged. “The Staffordshire theme park will offer entrants wrist bands containing tiny Radio Frequency Identification chips. Guests would be watched as they use the park and will be filmed on rides, which the creators say would also cut crime. At the end of the day they would then be given the option to buy the footage in a personalised DVD.”
BBC NEWS
Spam Goes into this Colorful Spam Cube Over Here. “The 4.5″ cube connects to your network and automatically filters spam emails. Via toolbar buttons in Outlook and Outlook express the cube can learn in case it flags a legit email. Other email programs and also Linux and Mac OS are supported as well. The learning buttons are only in Outlook so far though. “
I4U News
counter intelligence. “The spoon is equipped with sensors that measure temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity, and is connected to a computer via a cable. The sensors evaluate the different properties of the food, and send them to the computer for further processing.”
mit media lab
Music Thing: Monome Controller. “”The wonderful thing about this device is that is doesn’t do anything really,” say the developers of the Monome, a minimalist-but-clever button-covered box. “It wasn’t intended for any specific application. We’ll make several applications, and others will make more. We hope to share as many of these as possible. Drum machines, loopers, 1-bit video transformers, physics models, virtual sliders, math games, etc.”"
Engadget
Sound QR Code. “NTT DoCoMo has developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers’ mobile phones “listen” to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second.”
we make money not art
Tangible Flags: collaborative field trip for kids. “Our goal was to see the impact of the Tangible Flags concept on children’s collaborative effort and ability to re-locate or elaborate on their findings. These initial flags were not computationally enhanced, so adult researchers helped the children correlate Tangible Flags with various media, such as notes taken or pictures drawn by the children, or audio and video recordings created by the children.”
pasta and vinegar
Street Interconnectivity. “Google Cartography uses Google via the Google Search API [] to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area. This application takes a starting street and finds streets that intersect with it. Traversing the streets in a breadth-first manner, the application discovers more and more intersections, eventually producing a graph that shows the interconnectivity of streets flowing from the starting street.”
pasta and vinegar
Socialtext launches mobile wiki app: “Miki ™”. “Today we launched Miki — a wiki platform optimized for mobile devices. As wikis are becoming an essential communications tool for enterprises, so to is being able to access and edit anywhere.”
Smart Mobs
Zillow Goes 3D. “This is a perfect use for Live.com Local, allowing potential buyers to get a better view of the homes they are considering purchasing.”
TechCrunch
Natural light ‘to reinvent bulbs’. “A light source that could put the traditional light bulb in the shade has been invented by US scientists. [...] The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.”
BBC NEWS
Toshiba Matsushita Display intros world’s thinnest 12-inch LCD. “Ranging from 2.9- to 4.5-millimeters thick, the new LED-backlit TFT display manages a 1280 x 800 WXGA resolution and 300cd/m2 brightness, packed into a light 183-gram design.”
Engadget
E-mail based bookmarking. “As you receive your “toread” websites by email, you can save them in your local disk and browse them at any time, with no online connection required.”
Lifehacker
Local Coupons via RSS from Zixxo. “Silicon Valley based Zixxo has launched a great service that I asked for last year (#4 on this list) – local coupons via RSS. This is a very big market. Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used (Zixxo has more coupon stats here).”
TechCrunch
Flash drive swells up when filled with data. “Like a tick that balloons when engorged with its host’s blood, the Flashbag blimps out when you fill it with ones and zeros.”
Boing Boing
PixelShade. “Details are sketchy at this point, but this PixelShade lets you create digital patterns and then it projects them on the inside of its cylindrical shape. The phosphorescent lamp shade can display images, text, or anything else on its surface, and it’s easily modified, too.”
Gizmodo
Users turn to second-hand Microsoft licences. “Discount-licensing.com, the trading name of Disclic Ltd, offers cost savings of 20–50 per cent on licences for older versions of Microsoft titles. The licences are bought in bulk, for between 2–20,000 seats. Buyers may not get exactly the licence they would get from conventional channels because the licence will have been bought before, by a company now insolvent or downsizing.”
The Register
Search users ‘stop at page three’. “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results, says a US study. At most, people will go through three pages of results before giving up, found the survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect.”
BBC NEWS
The ‘Disposable’ Media Player. “It’s as if the device from Evergreen is a key fob with simple buttons – all you have to do is slip in your SD drive full of your favorite songs and away you go. Oh – and all for $9! Cheaper than a disposable camera – and more fun!!”
PSFK
Copy and paste between computers. “Just enter in any URL that starts with http://cl1p.net and post. Then from any other computer enter the same URL and copy.”
Lifehacker
Intelligent Tiles. “Apparently these tiles act as switches and can be embedded in walls and floors (??).”
Gizmodo
Samsung unveils Korean card phone. “Samsung has shown off a mobile phone that’s little bigger than a credit card. The ultra-slim handset – dubbed the Platinum Cardphone but more labelled with the more prosaic model number SCH-V870 – measures just 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9cm and weighs 81g.”
Reg Hardware
“Electronic Board” displays messages on walls. “It apparently displays text, voice and video messages on a wall, and includes smart cards that can be used to send canned responses. Of course, it’s probably part of some “smart home of the future” demo, which means it’ll never be produced in Korea or anywhere else”
Engadget
Hunaja: user study of a mobile social software. “Hunaja is an RFID access control system that enables users to remotely check who is logged in at a physical location by using the Web or a mobile phone. [...] In addition to controlling the doors of the Aula space, Hunaja has three unique features: Linkage to Aula’s weblog – enabling online members to remotely see who is logged in at Aula’s physical space. SMS access – enabling members to check who’s there with their mobile phones. A speech synthesizer at the door – enabling online members to send greeting messages. The messages are announced by a computer voice when the recipient logs inat Aula’s door”
pasta and vinegar
The paperless environment for musicians. “The MusicPad Pro Linux-based tablet PC weighs a tad under five pounds and displays music notation on a low-glare LCD screen, overcoming the distractive and disruptive task of page turning. Musicians “turn” the on-screen pages using a foot pedal, leaving both hands free to perform while a “look ahead” feature a half-page preview of upcoming music.”
gizmag
Pupils use mobiles to ‘bully’ teachers. “TEACHERS have complained of “bullying” by pupils who use mobile phones to film them losing their temper and then send the videos to their friends for amusement. Often, the pupils goad staff into “ranting for the camera” to make the video as entertaining as possible.”
Times Online
Just face it, girls: MySpace is like so totally over. “The technology magazine .net recently proclaimed Faceparty to be ‘best community site’. Its editor, Lisa Jones, explains: ‘It’s really grown under the radar. Since Murdoch bought MySpace, everyone’s heard of it. But Faceparty has got this underground appeal.’ Gemma, 17, joined after a friend’s recommendation. ‘I only checked it out because one of my friends made me and now I’m hooked. It’s the best way to kill time at college.’ The director of Faceparty, David Bamforth, says: ‘The grown-ups know all about MySpace, but very little about us. Their kids get home from school and spend hours on it. We try really hard to keep out of the press.’”
Guardian Unlimited
Disney to make TV shows available free on Web. “Top ABC shows such as “Commander in Chief” and “Alias,” along with “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives,” will be available on the Web at ABC.com in May and June, starting the day after they are first broadcast, the network said. They will only be available to users with a U.S. Internet address to protect foreign broadcasting rights. Viewers will be able to pause and move between “chapters” in an episode, but not skip ads that are technically embedded.”
Reuters.com
Sharing in-game screenshots. “Multitap.net is a service that allows you to share your in-game screenshots with your friends. You can rate, discuss and categorise your screenshots as you see fit. Do something funny, interesting, bizarre or impressive in a game, and share a screenshot!”
pasta and vinegar
Ricardo Self-Weighing Luggage. “This line, named “The Solutions” offers a digital scale that is built into the luggage. It helps keep you avoid those overweight-luggage penalties. The luggage is available in 25-inch and 28-inch size and can be purchased in maul teal, crushed berry, or black.”
Gizmodo
Seura Television Mirror. “If you can’t be without your TV for even a few minutes, the Seura Television Mirror gives you an LCD HDTV display magically hiding behind a bathroom mirror. Available in a variety of screen sizes from 26 to 45 inches, it’s an easy retrofit with a surface mount unit, or it can be recessed. It uses a 1920×1080 Sharp flat panel, equipped with an CableCARD-enabled HDTV tuner.”
Gizmodo
Air France says ‘oui’ to in-flight text messaging. “Air France is to allow passengers to use their mobile phones once airborne on certain flights, though only for text messaging and data applications, the airline announced last week – voice calls will be interdit for the time being.”
The Register
PLEDs. “PLED technology is very energy efficient and lends itself to the creation of ultra-thin lighting displays that will operate at lower voltages. The resulting benefits include brighter, clearer displays with viewing angles approaching 180 degrees; simpler construction resulting in cheaper, more robust display modules, and fast response times allowing full color video pictures even at low temperature”
Transmaterial
iTod MP3 Player for Infants. “Things must be pretty good if companies can devote time and resources to developing items such as the iTod, an MP3 player from Fisher-Price designed exclusively for tiny babies—infants, if you will. The iTod includes a pair of volume-restricted headphones so as not to harm your pride and joy’s hearing.”
Gizmodo
Music fingerprinting system is fastest yet. “To make a fingerprint, MusicIP quickly scans the first 2 minutes of a track and records frequency data every 185 milliseconds, before compressing the results into a 512 byte file. It also measures records the four most dominant tones in the first 30 seconds of the music. The program uses information about these dominant tones to narrow the search before searching the song database using the frequency information. Dunn says this allows the company to perform hundreds of searches each second and that the service is sensitive enough to distinguish between different versions of the same tune, such as live and studio recordings.”
New Scientist Tech
A Web Site Born in U.S. Finds Fans in Brazil. “Orkut, the invention of a Turkish-born software engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace rules teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil. About 11 million of Orkut’s more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil — a remarkable figure given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home.”
New York Times
Varibel glasses sport eight conversation-enhancing mics. “Any gadget that enhances two of your senses at once is worth at least a mention in these pages, so we hereby present you with the not-completely-unattractive-looking Varibel hearing aid eyeglasses. The manufacturers would take issue with calling it a hearing aid, however, as regular in-ear models pick up conversations as well as ambient noise, while the four mics on each arm of Varibel’s glasses supposedly separate the two types of sound, enhancing the former while dampening the latter.”
Engadget
Bluetooth Wireless speakers can redefine the living space. “The Parrot system is very clever in its design. Each speaker is independent with its own built-in amplifier. The first speaker to detect a Bluetooth source becomes the master speaker and reproduces stereo channel 1. The second speaker pairs up with the master speaker and reproduces stereo channel 2.”
gizmag
Street Sudoku. “Two days ago, I spotted a girl in Lausanne, Switzerland, solving a Sudoku on a street poster; It’s actually an advertisement for a swiss game but some folks seem to like doing the Sudoku on much bigger dimensions than a newspaper format. I spotted this picture in Geneva, it’s the second street-sudoku that I saw solved”
pasta and vinegar
Courts Test Internet Trials. “Weblogs, or Internet diaries, are about to gain more than just curious readers. Korean courts are now experimenting whether they could operate court trials and hearings just through Internet postings, saving everybody the trouble of actually entering the courtroom. The Seoul Administration Court recently designated one of its court units, which rules on labor-management relations and industrial accidents, to develop a prototype model for Internet-based trial models by the end of this month.”
The Korea Times
Subway phonecammers fight harassment. “Remember the grinning exhibitionist in NYC whose photo was uploaded to flickr, leading to his arrest? New York magazine’s latest issue has an article on the perpetrator, Dan Hoyt, and the young woman who phonecammed him, fifteen year old Thao Nguyen. Some of Nguyen’s fans have started Hollabacknyc.com, a blog where women upload phonecam pix of street harassers.”
Smart Mobs
‘Female’ robot ‘models’ in Kyoto. “Robo Garage, a venture company formed by prestigious Kyoto University, has unveiled “Female Type,” a bipedal robot modeled on a woman. Weighing in at a tiny 800 grams and standing 35 centimeters tall, Female Type, or FT for short, stands out for its feminine shape and ability to strut along like a fashion model.”
MSN-Mainichi Daily News
When You Can’t Take It With You, a Scan Saves the Pages for a Later Look. “This $300 pen-shaped device can be dragged down the length of a page to create a file that can be transferred to a Mac or PC through a U.S.B. connection. The text can also be edited using character recognition software that comes with the $350 “professional” package. Unlike previous models of the pen, the RC800 can scan in color, useful for photos and brochures.”
New York Times
Cabspotting: an alternate view of a living city. “Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?”
Boing Boing
A Tug of War Over Keywords. “TheMLSonline.com, a listings service, bought several keywords on Google and Yahoo, including “Edina Realty.” That did not sit well with a company called — you guessed it — Edina Realty. Such trademark lawsuits have been filed before, but Mr. Goldman says this is the first one likely to go to trial. Also, most of the previous plaintiffs sought redress from the search engines, not the purchasers of keywords.”
New York Times
Podcasts Calling. “a shift is afoot in the usage of podcasts, which are home-brewed audio or video broadcasts of everything from rap to religious services. Long tied to PCs or iPods (hence the name), podcasting fans are moving on to mobile phones, which increasingly boast more computer-like features. Plus, new software recently available from outfits such as Pod2Mobile and UpSnap allows users of basic phone models to download and listen to podcasts wirelessly, cutting the PC and portable music player out of the equation.”
Business Week
HP R927 Camera Adds Slimming Effect, Makes Girlfriend Happy. “It’s a pretty subtle change we’ve built into the camera,” Karl Wardrop, HP’s digital imaging product manager told the New York Post. “It’s not dramatic. It slims the center of photos and slightly widens the outside to maintain perspective. It’s like the (fun-house) mirror from the fair, but not as exaggerated.”
Gizmodo
Lamp, Computer Merge, Transformers Style. “This is a computer that can double as a basic table lamp. Don’t expect this computer to be able run F.E.A.R. at a full resolution—it seems more like a functional art piece. But the ultimate question still remains: Is it a lamp inside a computer or a computer inside a lamp?”
Gizmodo
The most adorable spambot killer ever. “While computers are getting better and better at optical character recognition, one thing that they still have great difficulty doing is recognizing the contents of pictures. Oli, who runs a web site called ThePCSpy.com, realized that a computer would have a great deal of difficulty in telling the difference between different types of fuzzy animals. So he came up with KittenAuth, a test that requires the user to identify which three out of nine pictures contain kittens. “
Ars Technica
Viruses ‘trained’ to build tiny batteries. “Researchers trying to make tiny machines have turned to the power of nature, engineering a virus to attract metals and then using it to build minute wires for microscopic batteries. The resulting nanowires can be used in minuscule lithium ion battery electrodes, which in turn would be used to power very small machines, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.”
Reuters
HP provides deets on gesture keyboard. “According to HP, the keypad, which was developed by the company’s Bangalore-based research team, can reproduce the script used in Hindi and other Indic languages, a process that would require up to 1,000 keys using a traditional keyboard (though most keyboards designed for such languages rely on keystroke combinations, rather than actual 1,000-key layouts).”
Engadget
India’s Lust for Luxe. “What’s changing, of course, is India’s demographic makeup as the nation’s booming economy mints a critical mass of newly affluent consumers. Last year, the average Indian salary surged 14% (18% for IT professionals), the highest wage growth in Asia, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, a global human-resources company. There are now about 1.6 million Indian households that spend an average of $9,000 a year on luxury goods, according to The Knowledge Company, a management-consulting firm in New Delhi. “With multi-income families and increasing international exposure through travel and the Internet, the attitude is changing from the traditional [emphasis on] savings to a spending approach,” says Thakran of LVMH. “The expense basket is shifting from necessity to lifestyle products.”
TIME Asia
Mobile Web Server. “As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the “administrator” to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.”
NRC
Intel unveils healthcare tablet PC at IDF Japan. “The company is putting efforts in the healthcare IT domain, focusing on the standardization/interoperability of various healthcare devices and the development of devices for healthcare workers. The potential of the latter was demonstrated by the Healthcare Tablet PC prototype, which is equipped with an RFID reader, a patient information viewer, a digital camera, etc.”
RFID in Japan
FACE TRACKER locks into faces in camera phones for optimal focus, exposure, and white balance. “Face Tracker for camera phones uses a radically new approach to identify and lock onto human faces in a camera phone’s preview image, tracking them as they move around within the frame and automatically adjusting focus, exposure, and white balance before the image is captured, ensuring that faces are optimally taken and that skin tones are reproduced with exceptional accuracy.”
gizmag
TV enters a new universe. “Mike Stickle has been in love with TV ever since Edith Bunker asked Archie to tell her she was “somethin’.” These days, the former magazine executive is trying to break into the business, creating a show of his own, tentatively dubbed “Floaters,” a comedy about three young women in New York. It launches in May. But don’t look for it on any network. Rather, it will appear on the website phoebeworks.com. And don’t expect a “Friends”-style half hour. His will be broken up into eight-minute daily blocks for Internet streaming and smaller two- to three-minute chunks for cellphones or iPods, because, says the neophyte producer, the new generation wants “portable, quick entertainment.”"
csmonitor.com
LG’s Concept Wall Mounted Projector. “This device won the 2006 iF Design Gold Award, it is a flat-designed projector for wall-mounting purposes. There is a remote-controlled lens door, auto focus, zoom and ventilation is not a problem in the thin-metal housing.”
Gizmodo
Tribewanted – Another Unique Million Dollar Idea – It Will Work. “This is not just an online community. You actually become part of a Tribe on a real Fiji Island. Basically you buy yourself a 2nd life. During vacation you actually can visit the Island for real. The other time of the year you live in the Tribe online and share decisions and so on. “
I4U News
Podcast study shows current and future trends. “That’s not to suggest that there is little value in producing original content. Forrester is projecting that the number of households using podcasts will grow from 700,000 to 12.3 million over the next four years in the US alone. Even if time-shifted content retains the greatest percentage of use, the massive growth rate alone should account for a huge increase in users seeking stuff they haven’t yet heard of, meaning that podcast you were planning to celebrate the musical contributions of Wayne Newton may yet find an audience.”
Ars Technica
TrackStick GPS Data Logger. “The unit actually houses a GPS receiver and will autonomously keep track of its location including time, date, speed, direction and altitude and store this data in its memory. The recorded information can then be downloaded to your computer VIA the USB connection and be integrated with Mapquest, Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth to give you a visual plot of where the TrackStick has travelled. Most of the unit’s size can probably be attributed to the fact it runs on 2 AAA batteries which will power it for about 5 to 7 days of ‘typical operation’ which amounts to about 4,000 records.”
OhGizmo!
Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds.. “While at eTech I had an idea to build a Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds. Steve and I have been working on it a few weeks on and off and here is what we have so far. The next step is putting it into a linear blog format so that you can have an RSS feed for your Xbox and it will tell you each day what happened to it.”
pasta and vinegar
Bluetooth headsets for Women. “We thought it was silly that it had taken a quarter century for the world to deliver a left-handed mouse for the 16% of mollydookers in the world, but when we saw BluePearls had announced a small, elegant Bluetooth headset aimed at women, it suddenly seemed obvious that not everyone wanted to dress up like R2D2. The headsets have interchangeable colour panels and are claimed to be the smallest and lightest on the market at just 7.9 grams.”
gizmag
Scrapbooking With Video and Sound, Minus the Paper and Glue. “For many scrapbookers, all that messy glue and paper is part of the fun. For others, it’s just a mess. MemoryMixer, digital scrapbooking software from Lasting Impressions for Paper Inc., not only helps keep things neat and tidy, but also lets scrapbookers add video and sound to their collections of memorabilia.”
New York Times
RFID Robot: Someone to Watch Over Me. “A pressure sensor detects your presence and the robot will ask you for a quick check of your bag. It will check for the tagged items once you bring your bag close to the reader. In case anything is missing the Robot will alert you by saying “You forgot the keys,” and so on. This device has proven to be extremely effective in the normal living environment.”
Gizmodo
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